1. Field
The present disclosure relates to thin-film ceramic capacitors.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, efforts have been made to thin portable information technology (IT) products such as smartphones, wearable devices, and the like. As part of these efforts, a need has increased for thinning passive elements in order to decrease an overall thickness of a package.
To this end, demand for thin-film ceramic capacitors capable of implementing a reduced thickness of a package, as compared to a multilayer ceramic capacitor, has also increased.
Such thin-film ceramic capacitors have an advantage in that thin capacitors may be implemented by using thin film technology.
Further, thin-film ceramic capacitors have an advantage of having low equivalent series inductance (ESL), unlike a multilayer ceramic capacitor according to the related art. As such, the application of thin-film ceramic capacitors for use as decoupling capacitors in application processors (APs) has been considered.
In order to use a thin-film ceramic capacitor as the decoupling capacitor in an application processor (AP) as described above, the thin-film ceramic capacitor has been manufactured in a form of a land-side capacitor.
However, in the case of existing embedded-type capacitors, it is difficult to rework or replace the capacitors when defects occur in the capacitors. As a result, entire devices may have to be written off as losses, thereby significantly increasing costs associated with defective capacitors. Therefore, there is a need to implement a thin-film ceramic capacitor in a form of a reworkable land-side capacitor (LSC).
Meanwhile, since the LSC type thin-film ceramic capacitor is disposed between solder balls, the thin-film ceramic capacitor should be designed to be as small as possible to significantly decrease a solder ball removal area.
At the same time, in a capacitor product manufactured using thin film technology, a method of forming vias for connections between an external electrode and an electrode layer and between electrode layers is important. Performance of the thin-film ceramic capacitor is affected by the method of forming the vias as described above and a final structure.
In a method of manufacturing a thin-film ceramic capacitor according to the related art, at the time of forming vias after repeatedly stacking dielectric layers and electrode layers, one via is required for each electrode layer. As a result, the method can require forming the same number of vias as the number of electrode layers.
In addition, as a patterning method at the time of stacking the electrode layers, a method commonly used involves stacking even-numbered electrode layers and odd-numbered electrode layers in different forms and etching one side surface so as to externally expose only even- or odd-numbered electrode layers and then connecting electrodes to each other.
However, these methods have problems in that the associated processes are complicated, thereby resulting in increased manufacturing costs. As a result, a need exists for a technology capable of easily manufacturing a more miniaturized thin-film ceramic capacitor.